Spyke

Replies

Comment on

Nintendo Is Telling Game Publishers Switch 2 Will Be Delayed

Reply in thread

The low quality parts thing can't be overstated. The original DS was really the last "Nintendium" quality hardware in my book. The DS Lite had a ton of issues people tend to forget about. Extremely flaky shoulder buttons, yellowed screens, and cracked hinges were not a question of if, but when. Mine lasted about 6 months before the R button stopped working reliably. The first generation 3DS was a step back in the right direction, and mine is still going strong, but the circle pad longevity is dubious and the bottom screen plastic scratches if you look at it wrong. Then came the New 3DS, which looked good on paper but the New 3DS LL was a huge disappointment. The backplate cracks around the screws, the hinge has tons of flop in it, and within a year the paint and coating was flaking off of the top shell leaving a ~2cm patch of bare metal. Then came the Switch, with the lowest quality sticks I've ever seen. Even my Switch Pro Controller drifts like crazy.

Knowing Nintendo the Switch 2 will already be obsolete at launch and power users will get better performance emulating the damn thing on modern hardware instead. Fool me twice, I, uh, won't get fooled again, or something.

Comment on

Japan swelters in its hottest July in more than a century

I'm in central Japan and this summer has been by far the worst in the 9 years I've been here. Energy prices are also through the roof right now since TEPCO chose to slander and FUD nuclear energy instead of admitting that their chain of penny-pinching, engineer-ignoring poor decisions was ultimately responsible for the Fukushima meltdown. I suspect a lot of people, particularly the elderly, are going to be squeezed past the breaking point as electric bills are doubling and tripling and air conditioning becomes an unaffordable luxury.

android

Comment on

*Permanently Deleted*

I test drove Heliboard the past week and I quite liked it, especially the customization options. I've been trying to escape Gboard for years but viable options with swipe typing support are few and far between.

Unfortunately, the lack of Japanese input makes it a total non-starter for my use case so I had to go crawling back.

Comment on

Lets Talk About Morrowind

The weirdness was so perfect and that personality and flavor is completely lacking in Skyrim. There was so much more variety in items and the unique stuff was great. This really enriched the storytelling and made for a lot of memorable moments. One of my favorites is when you're just walking through the world and an NPC just falls out of the sky, hits the ground, and dies. Then you loot his corpse, get his unique item of super jumping, and probably 99% of players immediately try it out, launch into the stratosphere, and splat like a tomato in exactly the same fashion. Or there were the unique boots that massively increased your running speed, but made you blind. Crafty players could leverage magic resistance to reduce the blinding effect and basically zoom around at superhuman speed with sunglasses on. Magic actually felt magical, compared to Skyrim where it amounts to little past being a source of damage. The system was designed to allow you freedom and find ways to surpass human abilities, and I think the world of the newer games is conversely designed to limit you as much as possible. No spellcrafting, extremely limited enchantments, few summoning options, no levitation, and the scaling system actually disincentivizes leveling. All the gear is essentially the same. It's a tragedy.

Now if you N'wahs will excuse me I have some clouds to yell at.

games

Comment on

BattleBit Remastered :: Update 2.0.0: Universal Healing, Map Reworks, New Vehicle [and] more!

Reply in thread

I hope the additional usefulness of bandages brings a very welcome uptick in support players looking for resupply points. Most classes can only carry a few and they'll run out even faster now. At least, I hope so. I was having a hard time successfully playing as anything other than medic, and found myself frequently completely empty without a single ammo box for miles.

Comment on

Undervolting feedback

I haven't tried it on Deck, but personally I'm a bit skeptical you'd get much tangible benefit over just setting lower package TDP limits as necessary, considering how much of a pain in the ass stable undervolting can be. TDP also has the advantage of per-game settings so you can just crank down undemanding games automatically instead of trying to juggle voltage/stability across the board.

games

Comment on

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League ‘Has Fallen Short of Our Expectations’, Warner Bros. Says

Reply in thread

Sorry, I must have missed the "no fun allowed" sign, but I'll bite. WB has now shitcanned 3 fully completed or nearly completed films. Then they claim the films are literally worse than worthless, and report all expenses incurred as loss, which lowers their tax burden. This is obviously a system designed to protect business when struggling, but it's a pretty clear example of abuse. The film/media industry in particular has a long and storied history of manipulative, abusive accounting, and there is essentially an entire cottage industry of legal experts who specialize in the art of bending the laws and threading the loopholes for maximum exploitation. There are enough legal smoke and mirrors that film productions can and do fudge absolutely everything remotely financial, often drastically inflating or deflating officially stated costs.

Another part of the problem is how damaging this kind of behavior is to the creators and production staff themselves. When a studio bins something like this everybody loses, except for the corpo leeches moving the beans around. Movie production can have a lot hanging on royalties. Imagine you do a job on a film for a token amount with a royalty component. Then a suit decides he can get a bigger bonus literally burning your movie instead, and suddenly you're out all that time invested and never receive proper or fair compensation for your work. The accountants can say, "Oh, this movie needed effects work, we only paid them with a few pizzas and a promised 1% royalty, now let's project ourselves some massive sales and extrapolate to claim 20 million spent on effects!" and suddenly it's money for nothing (and the chicks for free?) when the taxman comes around and listens to the sob story of burdensome expenses. Again, this kind of shenaniganry has decades of experience weaseling out of nearly all significant oversight or regulation and the corruption is systemic.

This also really sucks for everyone involved, even if they actually do get fully paid, because even a single movie can be several years of work that suddenly became a worthless, unverifieable void on a resume. Truth is, it's easy to rant for hours about the shady stuff going on.

Bringing it back around, the WB games arm hasn't been very good for people either. They've been shoehorning in predatory microtransactions and forcing battlepass style games-as-a-service mechanics in numerous games lately. I realize the devs themselves have no control over these kinds of additions forced from above. However, the catch-22 is that success for these games would only reward and reinforce the MBAs interjecting buzzwords and pulling the strings. So either the devs lose, and their game gets tossed, or the players lose, since management smells blood in the water and doubles down on profiteering mechanics in the next game. Unfortunately, rather than apply critical thinking and conclude that these toxic elements relate to the game's unpopularity, they took to the media playing the world's tiniest violin, vaguely gesturing that the poor devs worked so hard to make good games but the consumers are bad for not supporting them.

This also sucks, which feels bad. Therefore, I leveraged a sarcastic inference relating two morally dubious, greed-driven examples of poor behavior by a wealthy international megacorp trying to paint itself as a victim. Such attempts at humor are sometimes used to make bad feelings turn into slightly less bad feelings, lightening a mood or delivering some modicum of mirth. In some cultures, it might be called a "joke".